论文的第一作者为物理与天文学院博士生郑杰，孙爱乐，合作者还包括王宇杰教授，通讯作者为张洁教授。本工作得到了国家自然科学基金的资助（No.11474196 and No.11774221）。

On 10th, December, Physical Review Letters online, https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.248001published the new experimental results of Prof. Jie Zhang’s research group, where they discovered the peculiar behaviors of energy fluctuations in slowly sheared granular materials. This interesting work is selected as Editor’s Suggestion as a highlight on PRL’s official website. For a highly dissipative, far-from-equilibrium granular system, Prof. Zhang et al find that the energy fluctuations (panel a in Fig. a) show novel, Boltzmann-like statistics, which are different from those of local strain fields (panel b in Fig. b) of the system. This striking behavior is different from those of conventional amorphous solids, providing a breakthrough for a better understanding of plastic deformation in granular matter. This work provides directly experimental evidences for modifying the pervious continuum models or the mean field theories, and for exploring new statistical theories for those of complex systems.

They find that the probability distribution of particle-scale energy fluctuations shows a novel, Boltzmann-like exponential distribution through systematic studies. Based on this discovery and drawn upon the framework of soft glassy materials, the authors proposed an effective temperature X. The resulting character of X as a function of strain (Fig. 2) unveils such a physical picture.

The plastic deformation of jammed granular materials can be understood as an aging process: the granular systems are gradually evolved to a marginal state with the increases of shear strain. This picture nicely unifies the microscopic behaviors with the macroscopic plastic properties. This new finding indicates that although friction, force chain and dissipation are the three distinct characteristics of granular materials, the associated dynamical evolution is universal, being analogous with those of spin glass, thermal glassy materials (e.g., metallic glasses). As pointed out by the reviewers, “the experiments are nicely conducted and the results are interesting, which will inspire more research works in the field.”

The authors of the work are from the School of Physics and Astronomy and the Institute of Natural Sciences: the first authors are Jie Zheng and Aile Sun, the coauthor is Prof. Yujie Wang, and the corresponding author is Prof. Jie Zhang. This work is supported by the National Science Foundations of China under No. 11474196 and No. 11774221.